In color television recording systems that employ NTSC signals including horizontal sync and color burst components, inter alia, it is usually necessary to correct the timing errors caused by variations in tape speed, for example, or for frequency and phase differences appearing in the signal that is recorded. In order to provide the desired correction, prior art video systems generally employ a phase locked loop (PLL) including a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) to measure the difference in phase and frequency between the VCO clock frequency and the burst signal component of the composite color television signal. Also, to eliminate time base errors and provide a high degree of signal stability, it has been proposed to use digital circuits to digitize the video signal and to generate an error signal that is stored in memory to be used for frequency and phase correction. In such systems, correction of the phase error is accomplished in the time base correction network at the output of the system on a line-by-line basis. However, the phase error is cumulative and builds up along each horizontal line, so that it becomes more difficult to compensate for large phase errors. In addition, the phase locked loops used in prior art systems do not operate sufficiently fast to follow the rapid changes in the frequency and phase of the video signal recorded on the fast moving tape.